Four ways you use social media

If you think about your own behavior, you’ll realize that you use social media in at least four different ways:

Connect – Facebook is a friend network. The reason you visit your Facebook news feed is to see what’s happening with your friends. Updates from brands, including nonprofits, are mostly interruptions.

Discover – Twitter is where you discover interesting pictures, videos, and blog posts. You’ll also make new friends who might eventually become Facebook friends. YouTube is where you discover awesome videos, either by searching or browsing categories and trending videos.

Sharing – Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, and in fact all social media, is about sharing. On Facebook, you’ll share with friends; on Twitter and Pinterest, you’ll share with the world; and on Linked In you’ll share with professional connections.

Organizing – You use Facebook Groups and Google Hangouts to get things done. You share common goals – no matter how formal or informal – with the other members.

What these four uses have in common is that they’re all relational. You and your relationship with a person, or you and your relationship with content or a goal.

Facebook is not Amazon.com and Pinterest is not eBay

This isn’t to say that people don’t buy things as a result of using social media. If I find an awesome musical group on Google Plus, I’ll buy their music. When I saw a Facebook ad about the tsunami in Japan, I donated money by clicking on the ad.

That being said, I never use social media with the goal of buying something or donating to a nonprofit.